Parental Consent to Abortion: How Enforcement Can Vary

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: May 28, 1992

At Planned Parenthood of Greater Boston, Annie Faulkner answers a call from a 16-year-old who wants an abortion but does not want to get her parents' consent, as the law requires.

After 15 minutes of counseling, Ms. Faulkner tells the young woman to call back later for the name of a lawyer who will help her get a judge's approval instead of her parents'. As soon as she hangs up, the counselor goes to the files to match the teen-ager with one of the 200 lawyers, most of them women, who handle 1,000 such hearings each year in Massachusetts and routinely win judicial consent. An Unbroken Barrier

But what is routine in Massachusetts is all but unheard of in Indiana and in many other states with laws requiring girls under 18 years old who want an abortion to get the consent of a parent or a judge. In Indianapolis, abortion clinics advise minors to go to Kentucky or Illinois, where such laws are not being enforced, rather than go before a judge in Indiana.

"I've been here six years and I don't know anyone in Indianapolis who's gotten a judicial bypass," said Jane Stout, director of the Indianapolis Clinic for Women. "With the judges here, it's just not going to happen."

And Kentucky and Illinois, as well as many other states, may soon start enforcing their own laws requiring that minors to obtain parental consent or, at least, to notify their parents before seeking an abortion.

Parental involvement laws are gaining favor with legislators around the nation. Thirty-five states have them, though they are being enforced in only 18, with the others blocked by the courts or state attorneys general. (Just yesterday, a California judge blocked enforcement of that state's 1987 parental-consent law, saying it violated the privacy clause of the State Constitution.)

The United States Supreme Court's coming decision on Pennsylvania's abortion-control statute may offer new guidance on how far the states may go in forcing young women to involve their parents in their decisions to have an abortion.

Three out of four adults, including many who support abortion rights, say in opinion surveys that they favor parental involvement. This week the chairman of the Republican platform committee, Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, spoke of such laws as an area of possible compromise in the divisive abortion debate.

But how such laws are actually working -- whether they are preventing abortions, delaying them or encouraging teen-agers to seek their parents' counsel -- is largely a matter of perception and geography.

As in Indiana and Massachusetts, the actual impact of the laws varies enormously: in some cities, judges are very willing to grant waivers, while in others, judges refuse to hear the cases, or deny consent. And while the high courts in some states have made clear that judges must grant the waivers in most cases, other high courts have left the judges free to rule however they see fit.

New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have no parental-involvement laws. But one measure of the increasing popularity of such laws is that a parental notification bill in New York, similar to ones that died quickly in past years, is being taken more seriously this time around.

Studies in several states show that with or without the laws, most girls under 18 consult their parents before they have an abortion.

"Parents are the ones best able to guide their young children when faced with traumatic decisions," said Burke Balch, state legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee.

Mr. Balch and other anti-abortion leaders say the parental-consent laws have helped to reduce both the number of teen-agers getting pregnant and the number of teen-agers having abortions. Delays and Risks

But abortion rights groups, analyzing the same data, have concluded that the laws have caused no such reductions. Instead, they say, the laws have sent teen-agers across state lines to get abortions and have raised the percentage of those who postpone their abortions to the second trimester of pregnancy, which is riskier.

"Mostly the laws push girls to delay their abortions, have a baby they don't want, go out of state or find an illegal abortion," said Janet Benshoof, director of the abortion-rights advocacy program at the American Civil Liberties Union, whose legal team will leave the A.C.L.U. next month to form the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy.

Despite years of litigation, the constitutional boundaries of parental notification remain one of the murkiest areas of abortion law.

In 1990, the United States Supreme Court upheld an Ohio law requiring minors to notify one parent or obtain a judge's permission before having an abortion. It ruled in a companion case that a Minnesota law requiring notification of both parents was constitutional only because it provided the alternative of getting a judge's consent.

Parental involvement is back before the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, challenging a 1989 Pennsylvania law that requires minors seeking abortions to get the consent of one parent or a judge.